The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 31

["The Nature of Government," VOS, 146; pb 108.]

See also ANARCHISM; GOVERNMENT; PEACE MOVEMENTS; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; WAR.

"Package-Dealing," Fallacy of. "Package-dealing" is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or "package," elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.

[Leonard Peikoff, editor's footnote to Ayn Rand's "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," PWNI, 30; pb 24.]

[Package-dealing employs] the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by subst.i.tuting nonessentials for their essential characteristics, obliterating differences.

["How to Read (and Not to Write)," ARL, 1, 26, 3.]

A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: "A hungry man is not free," or "It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat." Most people accept these equivocations-and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

The difference between political power and any other kind of social "power," between a government and any private organisation, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

["America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business," CUI, 46.]

A typical package-deal, used by professors of philosophy, runs as follows: to prove the a.s.sertion that there is no such thing as "necessity" in the universe, a professor declares that just as this country did not have to have fifty states, there could have been forty-eight or fifty-two-so the solar system did not have to have nine planets, there could have been seven or eleven. It is not sufficient, he declares, to prove that something is, one must also prove that it had to be-and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes.

["The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," PWNI, 34; pb 28.]

See also "ANTI-CONCEPTS"; DEFINITIONS; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FUNDAMENTALITY, RULE of; NECESSITY; "RAND'S RAZOR"; STATISM.

Painting. Painting [re-creates reality] by means of color on a two-dimensional surface.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 46.]

The so-called visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) produce concrete, perceptually available ent.i.ties and make them convey an abstract, conceptual meaning.

[Ibid., 47.]

The visual arts do not deal with the sensory field of awareness as such, but with the sensory field as perceived by a conceptual consciousness.

[Ibid.]

It is a common experience to observe that a particular painting-foi example, a still life of apples-makes its subject "more real than it is in reality." The apples seem brighter and firmer, they seem to possess an almost self-a.s.sertive character, a kind of heightened reality which neither their real-life models nor any color photograph can match. Yet if one examines them closely, one sees that no real-life apple ever looked like that. What is it, then, that the artist has done? He has created a visual abstraction.

He has performed the process of concept-formation-of isolating and integrating-but in exclusively visual terms. He has isolated the essential, distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of apples, and integrated them into a single visual unit. He has brought the conceptual method of functioning to the operations of a single sense organ, the organ of sight.

[Ibid. ]

The closer an artist comes to a conceptual method of functioning visually, the greater his work. The greatest of all artists, Vermeer, devoted his paintings to a single theme: light itself. The guiding principle of his compositions is: the contextual nature of our perception of light (and of color). The physical objects in a Vermeer canvas are chosen and placed in such a way that their combined interrelations.h.i.+ps feature, lead to and make possible the painting's brightest patches of light, sometimes blindingly bright, in a manner which no one has been able to render before or since.

(Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer's work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.) One might wish (and I do) that Vermeer had chosen better subjects to express his theme, but to him, apparently, the subjects were only the means to his end. What his style projects is a concretized image of an immense, nonvisual abstraction: the psycho-epistemology of a rational mind. It projects clarity, discipline, confidence, purpose, power-a universe open to man. When one feels, looking at a Vermeer painting: "This is my view of life," the feeling involves much more than mere visual perception.

[Ibid., 48.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ART; BEAUTY; CONCEPTS; CONTEXT; ESTHETICS; MODERN ART; SENSE of LIFE; STYLE; SUBJECT (in ART); VISUAL ARTS.

Parts of Speech. See Grammar.

Patents and Copyrights. Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his mind.

["Patents and Copyrights," CUI, 130.]

What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind's contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object's value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.

It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot be patented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, which identifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previously known, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he did not create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming it to be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoods except by his permission. He ran copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authors.h.i.+p of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it-but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature-an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed.

The government does not "grant" a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it-i.e.. the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner's exclusive right of use and disposal.

[Ibid.]

Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue.... In the case of copyrights, the most rational solution is Great Britain's Copyright Act of 1911. which established the copyright of books, paintings, movies, etc. for the lifetime of the author and fifty years thereafter.

[Ibid., 132.]

As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser's work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn't. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a compet.i.tor winning the race, which is true of all types of compet.i.tion.

[Ibid., 133.]

See also CREATION; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Peace Movements. Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictators.h.i.+ps; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed.

Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictators.h.i.+ps. Yet this is what today's alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate-in the name of love for humanity.

["'The Roots of War," CUI, 35.]

It is capitalism that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate-in the name of peace.

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relations.h.i.+ps. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.

[Ibid., 37.]

It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fas.h.i.+oned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him. And there is something obscene in the att.i.tude of those who regard horror as a matter of numbers, who are willing to send a small group of youths to die for the tribe, but scream against the danger to the tribe itself-and more: who are willing to condone the slaughter of defenseless victims, but march in protest against wars between the well-armed....

If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force-outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace-those who do love man and do care about his survival-realize that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed.

[Ibid., 42.]

See also CAPITALISM; DICTATORs.h.i.+P; FOREIGN POLICY; GENOCIDE; PACIFISM; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM; WAR.

Perception. The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A "perception" is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of ent.i.ties, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual a.s.sociations, but it can go no further.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 10; pb 19.]

Man's senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can he no knowledge and no science.

["Kant Versus Sullivan." PWNI, 108; pb 90.]

Although, chronologically, man's consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual-epistemologically, the base of all of man's knowledge is the perceptual stage.

Sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation. As far as can be ascertained, an infant's sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts.

A percept is a group of sensations aummatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of "direct perception" or "direct awareness," we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery.

[ITOE, 5.].

[Man's] senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate s.n.a.t.c.hes independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate.... His senses cannot deceive him, ... physical objects cannot act without causes, ... his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort ... the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives.

[GS, FNI, 194; pb 156.]

Let the witch doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception.

[Ibid., 193; pb 155.]

The arguments of those who attack the senses are merely variants of the fallacy of the "stolen concept."

[ITOE, 4.].

As far as can be ascertained, the perceptual level of a child's awareness is similar to the awareness of the higher animals: the higher animals are able to perceive ent.i.ties, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of ent.i.ties. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction -of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from ent.i.ties. It has been said that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept "two."

[Ibid., 19.]

The range of man's perceptual awareness-the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time-is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units-as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.

["The Psycho-Epistemology of Art," RM, 20; pb 17.]

See also AXIOMS; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; ENt.i.tY; EPISTEMOLOGY; FREE WILL; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; REASON; SELF-EVIDENT; SENSATIONS; "STOLEN CONCEPT," FALLACY of; UNIT-ECONOMY.

Performing Arts. Let us turn now to the performing arts (acting, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing).

In these arts, the medium employed is the person of the artist. His task is not to re-create reality, but to implement the re-creation made by one of the primary arts.

This does not mean that the performing arts are secondary in esthetic value or importance, but only that they are an extension of and dependent on the primary arts. Nor does it mean that performers are mere "interpreters": on the higher levels of his art, a performer contributes a creative element which the primary work could not convey by itself; he becomes a partner, almost a co-creator-if and when he is guided by the principle that he is the means to the end set by the work.

The basic principles which apply to all the other arts, apply to the performing artist as well, particularly stylization, i.e., selectivity: the choice and emphasis of essentials, the structuring of the progressive steps of a performance which lead to an ultimately meaningful sum. The performing artist's own metaphysical value-judgments are called upon to create and apply the kind of technique his performance requires. For instance, an actor's view of human grandeur or baseness or courage or timidity will determine how he projects these qualities on the stage. A work intended to be performed leaves a wide lat.i.tude of creative choice to the artist who will perform it. In an almost literal sense, he has to embody the soul created by the author of the work: a special kind of creativeness is required to bring that soul into full physical reality.

When the performance and the work (literary or musical) are perfectly integrated in meaning, style and intention, the result is a magnificent esthetic achievement and an unforgettable experience for the audience.

The psycho-epistemological role of the performing arts-their relations.h.i.+p to man's cognitive faculty-lies in the full concretization of the metaphysical abstractions projected by a work of the primary arts. The distinction of the performing arts lies in their immediacy-in the fact that they translate a work of art into existential action, into a concrete event open to direct awareness.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 64.]

Music and/or literature are the base of the performing arts and of the large-scale combinations of all the arts, such as opera or motion pictures. The base, in this context, means that primary art which provides the metaphysical element and enables the performance to become a concretization of an abstract view of man.

Without this base, a performance may be entertaining, in such fields as vaudeville or the circus, but it has nothing to do with art. The performance of an aerialist, for instance, demands an enormous physical skill -greater, perhaps, and harder to acquire than the skill demanded of a ballet dancer-but what it offers is merely an exhibition of that skill, with no further meaning, i.e., a concrete, not a concretization of anything.

[Ibid., 70.]

See also ART; BALLET; DANCE; ESTHETICS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); METAPHYSICAL VALUE JUDGMENTS; MUSIC; OPERA and OPERETTA; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY.

Permission (vs. Rights). A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be exercised without anyone's permission.

If you exist only because society permits you to exist-you have no right to your own life. A permission can be revoked at any time.

If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society-you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.

Do not make the mistake, at this point, of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer's permission. He does not hold it by permission-but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job. A slave cannot.

["Textbook of Americanism," pamphlet, 5.]

See also CONTRACTS; INALIENABILITY; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.

Philosophy. Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relations.h.i.+p to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy-is the soil which makes the forest possible.

["Philosophy: Who Needs It," PWNI, 2; pb 2.]

Philosophy is the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence. The task of philosophy is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life. This view serves as a base, a frame of reference, for all his actions, mental or physical, psychological or existential. This view tells him the nature of the universe with which he has to deal (metaphysics); the means by which he is to deal with it, i.e., the means of acquiring knowledge (epistemology); the standards by which he is to choose his goals and values, in regard to his own life and character (ethics)-and in regard to society (politics); the means of concretizing this view is given to him by esthetics.

["The Chickens' Homecoming," NL, 107.]

In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is-i.e., he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts-i.e., he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.

["Philosophy and Sense of Life," RM, 37; pb 30.]

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation-or let your subconscious acc.u.mulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.

["Philosophy: Who Needs It," PWNI, 6; pb 5.]

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power.

The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them-from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.

[Ibid., 8; pb 6.]

Philosophy is a necessity for a rational being: philosophy is the foundation of science, the organizer of man's mind, the integrator of his knowledge, the programmer of his subconscious, the selector of his values.

["From the Horse's Mouth," PWNI, 99; pb 82.]

just as a man's actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society's existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 27; pb 28.]

The power that determines the establishment, the changes, the evolution, and the destruction of social systems is philosophy. The role of chance, accident, or tradition, in this context, is the same as their role in the life of an individual: their power stands in inverse ratio to the power of a culture's (or an individual's) philosophical equipment, and grows as philosophy collapses. It is, therefore, by reference to philosophy that the character of a social system has to be defined and evaluated.